Text: Matthew 15:10-28 Revised Standard Version (RSV)
Things That Defile
10 And he called the people to him and said to them, “Hear and understand: 11 not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.” 12 Then the disciples came and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?” 13 He answered, “Every plant which my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. 14 Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” 15 But Peter said to him, “Explain the parable to us.” 16 And he said, “Are you also still without understanding? 17 Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and so passes on?[a] 18 But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. 19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. 20 These are what defile a man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man.”
The Canaanite Woman’s Faith
21 And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22 And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and cried, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely possessed by a demon.” 23 But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying after us.” 24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 26 And he answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” 27 She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 28 Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly.
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
We have already talked at length over the last few years about how the Pharisees of Jesus’ day had lots and lots of rules. Even today, modern Jews have a lot of rules, customs, and traditions; as Tevye the Milkman says in “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Here in Anatevka, we have traditions for everything: how to eat, how to sleep, how to wear clothes. For instance, we always keep our heads covered, and always wear a little prayer-shawl. This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition start? I’ll tell you. I don’t know. But it’s a tradition. And because of our traditions, every one of us knows who he is, and what God expects him to do.”[1]
Well and good; we all have our traditions, our rules, too. I have a lot of what I call “personal rules,” some of which I think are pretty important, and others that are probably pretty inconsequential; but, like the traditions Tevye talks about, they help me to keep my balance as I make my way in the world.
But what happened to Tevye and his world, and what happened in Jesus’ day, and also what happens so often in our day, is that sometimes the traditions and rules that were meant to guide and help turned into crushing burdens.
Today’s lesson starts with Jesus’ response to some Pharisees and scribes who observe that his – Jesus’ – disciples are eating without first ritually washing their hands, and so they forthrightly accuse them of Breaking The Rules. It’s true; they were. But just whose rules were they breaking, anyway? The Pharisees were big on what is called “ritual purity.” The special edition of the National Geographic magazine “The Story of Jesus” tells us: “One purported source of contention between Jesus and the Pharisees was ritual purity. Traditionally the purity system as defined in the Law was a matter for priests, to be applied within the Temple. The Pharisees sought to transfer the purity cult to homes and lifestyles, thus sanctifying the Jewish experience in everything a person did. In the process, they formulated detailed rules governing food preparation, bathing, tithing, and Sabbath observance, many of which would become core tenets of Rabbinic Judaism in the centuries to come.”[2] In other words, the Pharisees took these purity rituals out of the Temple, where they made sense, and attempted to inflict them on everyday life, with the predictable result that very few people got them right. Ritual hand washing was one of these practices. Now, washing your hands is very practical, as we all know – then as now, it was a way to prevent dysentery, just as the ban on eating pork was originally meant to prevent trichinosis and other diseases that break out because of the heat of the land in that part of the world and the lack of refrigeration. But that practical reason behind washing your hands, as well as the reasons behind all the other rules very quickly got lost, and all that was left were the strict rules themselves, followed for their own sake, just like Tevye’s head coverings and prayer shawls.
Jesus turns this attitude right around on the Pharisees by asking them why they break an even greater rule – that of honoring their parents by taking what they owe them and instead giving it to God. This was apparently a pretty widespread practice for Jesus to focus on it. Jesus shines a spotlight on their wayward thinking and sends them away with a quote from Isaiah about teaching human doctrines as God’s precepts:
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’”
This practice of teaching human precepts as God’s doctrines did not begin and end with the Pharisees of the 1st Century. Just about every generation has to deal with this tendency. It’s a very small step to go from saying “that’s how we’ve always done it” to “that’s the way God wants us to do it.”
That is one of the struggles of human existence. More often than not, we fail in that struggle. But when we do, and then, in the words of Acts 3:19, “repent and turn back” to the Lord, we find that our gracious and loving God wipes out our sins. You might say that God presses the “reset button.” And then we begin again the process of trying our best not to repeat those mistakes that got us into trouble in the first place. As the writer Alyce McKenzie tells us: “It’s too late to retract our harmful acts. But, as Scarlett O’Hara once said after spending several hours of movie time spouting hurtful words, ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ There is something called a second chance. There’s God’s grace to forgive, and there will always be a fresh opportunity to take the high road with the people around us, both those we love without even trying and those we have to work to love.”[3]
That’s what’s behind Jesus’ words regarding washing hands and eating unclean foods. Jesus rightly says that it’s not what goes into us that defiles us, but what comes out. What comes out of us comes from the heart, from the center of our beings. If that gets poisoned, then whatever comes out of it will likely be poisoned also. That’s where we need to pay attention, for as Jesus said, all the other rules are like plants not planted by God, and those who place all their concentration on them are nothing but blind guides who can’t even help themselves, much less help us.
The first takeaway for us today is that, when it comes to following Jesus and doing what he calls us to do, what’s important is that we do it. It’s fine to follow our rituals and personal rules to keep our balance, but we need to make sure that by doing so we don’t cause others to lose theirs. And, besides, at the end of the day, the rules we might or might not be breaking are really very much a secondary consideration.
The second takeaway is that, as the 1871 Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown Commentary on the Whole Bible tells us: “…nothing which enters from without can really defile us; and that only the evil that is in the heart, that is allowed to stir there, to rise up in thought and affection, and to flow forth in voluntary action, really defiles a [person]!”[4] So we need to be careful in what we say, what we do, and how we do it.
Which brings us, finally, to the second half of today’s lesson – Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman.
It struck me at first as just a bit odd that the Gospel passage for today has these two parts, because, at least at first glance, they don’t seem to have much in common.
But the connection is there. It finally dawned on me that what underlies both parts of the lesson is overemphasizing human ideas and practices and at the same time underemphasizing God’s intentions.
The Pharisees put all their energy and effort into coming up with ever-more arcane rules that they then expected everybody else to follow, instead of recognizing that these rules were supposed to point to God. It’s analogous to something a history professor I had in college said about historical dates; Dr. Krempel said that “dates are not as important as their relative position.” Memorizing dates is not the point; the point is remembering what occurred on those dates and fitting these events together with what happened on other dates before and after them. Washing one’s hands is not as important as recognizing that so doing is a way to purify oneself, so that God is honored.
Now to the second part of the passage directly.
When Jesus and his disciples meet this Canaanite woman, they are very far from home. Very few Jewish people came to those parts, and those who did were more than likely to be found in the Jewish enclaves in the bigger towns and cities. We don’t know exactly where this encounter took place, but the lesson does say that Jesus “withdrew to the districts of Tyre and Sidon,” which gives me the impression that it happened out in the country somewhere.
Like everything else Jesus did, this was deliberate. For one thing, being in this territory pretty much guaranteed that he and his friends would not have to contend with the scribes and Pharisees for a while; for another, maybe they hoped to get a little rest from all the crowds that had been following them.
But that was not to be, because here’s this woman crying out to them to help her daughter. It must be that, even in that remote, non-Jewish country, Jesus’ reputation had spread, and this woman hopes that he would be the one to heal her daughter.
Unfortunately, there’s the obvious problem that she’s a Canaanite woman. Jews and Canaanites did not get along, and never had. So it’s not just amazing that Jesus and the disciples are there in Canaan in the first place, but that the woman even dreams that Jesus will help her in the second.
And, at first, it appears that the old animosity between Jew and Canaanite will prevail: Jesus simply refuses to even acknowledge that she’s there. The disciples finally implore Jesus to give her what she wants, not out of any sense of compassion or human kindness, but just so she’ll go away and leave them alone.
That’s when Jesus finally addresses her by saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In other words, “Sorry, can’t help you; you’re not part of the club.”
Now, every time I read this, I feel a kind of electric shock, because, like all of you, I grew up with the assumption that Jesus came for everybody. I remember the Apostle Paul’s words in his letter to the Galatians, chapter 3, verse 28, which boldly proclaim: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Yet here we see Jesus apparently saying the exact opposite, and we need to find out just what’s going on here.
Some scholars claim that Jesus said this as a kind of test to see whether the woman was sincere and not simply acting out of desperation, grasping at straws that maybe this “wizard” could help. Still others claim that Jesus really was serious about turning that Gentile woman away, because he really did understand his mission as one to the lost sheep of Israel only, which, if true, would mean, among other things, that we Gentiles would have been forever left out in the cold.
But both of these explanations do not match the image of the loving and compassionate Jesus I grew up with. I think that Jesus went to that far country knowing full well what was going to happen there, that he was going to meet that woman, and that he was going to heal her daughter. Asking that pointed question was his way to awaken in her a faith that may have long lain dormant. It was a way to press that reset button and begin the reconciliation, centuries overdue, between the Jews and the Canaanites. It was time for old animosities, old prejudices, old traditions, and old rules that had governed the way Jews and Canaanites interacted – or, more accurately, chose not to interact – to be done, so that the new day God had in store could dawn.
We live in that new day. We recognize that God loves all of us, his children, equally, even though we have such a terrible, terrible time loving each other.
But today, we have learned that rules are not as important as simply following Jesus as best we can. We have learned that it’s not what goes in to us that’s harmful, but what comes out, and that trying our best to let our words and actions build up and lift up is what we need to be about in this world. And finally, we have learned that a heart that is faithful and true, and asks only for the crumbs, is one that will see the wonders of God’s grace, and will work them, too!
So, let us go forth, humbly, bravely, and joyfully, and live fully in God’s new day!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fiddler_on_the_Roof_(film)
[2] National Geographic Society, “The Story of Jesus,” Washington, D.C., p.54
[3] McKenzie, Alyce, “It’s About What Comes Out: Reflections on Matthew 15:10-20,” http://www.patheos.com/resources/additional-resources/2011/08/its-about-what-comes-out-alyce-mckenzie-08-08-2011?p=3
[4] http://www.ccel.org/ccel/jamieson/jfb.xi.i.xvii.html